Saturday, February 4, 2017

Every now and again ii


Karen & Justin















   You don't mind
   letting winter
   know its place.









The more we see of this
new American government,
the less endearing seems
its vast naïveté, believ-
ing it lucked out with a
jackpot of pure January,
unaware of things a vine
could tell them, of what
folly it is to reverse a
prior grafting in an or-
ganism it defined. They
are children with eras-
ers, against indelible
vitality, attempting to
the very fact of time.


























Edward Weston
Juniper
  Lake Tenaya
  Yosemite Valley
1937


Brown
  The Last Discovery
  of America
Viking, 2002©













Friday, February 3, 2017

Make us a watchman iv: the test of torsion





Among the roughly several
dozen aspects of the dance
which intrigue us, torsion's
revelation of proportionality
in dynamics counts, one should
guess, high.




Backlighted by rectilinear
blocks of light and shadow
the model portrays a re-in-
terpretation of the tableau
as an orderly procession in
his own physical structure.

De Stijl gives us the rota-
tion of a square generating
an isosceles triangle with
each renewal of its scale.

Which is the more improbab-
le in nature, we sometimes
aren't inspired to ask, un-
til human conduct is put to
the same test; and then tor-
sion gives us the spectacle
of balance as a scrupulous
discipline. Time and again,
we respect it spontaneously.

Time and again, we almost
can't explain it, until we
see its absence, and a col-
lapse permits our gaze to
experience disappointment,






Some are now suggesting, a
strategy of the new Ameri-
can government is to compel
us not to watch. If so, it
has chosen the wrong stage.























Theo van Doesburg 
1883 - 1931






Thursday, February 2, 2017

In White America


The press are agog with adap-
tations to Bannon's position
at the center of the National
Security establishment. Still
they query, is this a polit-
ical intrusion, is this some
gesture of ostensibly confus-
ing shock and awe, or does a
darker specter lurk within
the mystery? 






When a historian-playwright
quit his professorship at
Princeton in the late 60s,
he didn't leave because he
was not permitted to bring
a collaborator to his under-
graduate seminar. He left
because they wouldn't let
him bring his therapist.

Now in this most defining-
ly toxic of Presidencies -
one can scarcely call it,
an administration - the
greater risk lies in de-
priving the patient of a
shepherding nod from the

Bannon has guided ruin 
and revulsion, on very
little action. Who's to
say his has not been a
staying hand, in usher-
ing in the fun guy he's
aided to delight us?















Martin Duberman
In White America
1963





Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Origins of Wednesday xliii: Café of the analogues








  The flowing colonnade,
  the consonant current,
  inspire this sportsman
  with his contribution.

  His texts may be digi-
  tised; his play is all
  analogy.



























Puiforcat
Initiales
  Paralleles





Tuesday, January 31, 2017

You couldn't help but notice, could you


When he quickly fired
the lawyer, he didn't
say she'd defied him.

He said, poor infant,
she had betrayed him.



























Grace Kelly
To Catch a Thief
1955
Alfred Hitchcock
  Director
Robert Burks
  Cinematographer
  Academy Award






More, harder, I need to proclaim something






   Sam Waterston, an actor who
   channeled Abraham Lincoln
   for Ken Burns, and lots of
   other fine things -- my fav-
   orite is his Sidney in The 
   Killing Fields -- has issued
   the most generous, the most
   incalculably smart promoter
   ever to raise $24 miiion in
   a single weekend for the Am-
   erican Civil Liberties Union.
   I mean, yeah, eventually it
   will add up to real money.













   















Monday, January 30, 2017

And how we want to be in that number







               I am responsible for ensuring that 
               the positions we take in court re-
               main consistent with this institu-
               tion’s solemn obligation to always 
               seek justice and stand for what is 
               right. At present, I am not convin-
               ced that the defense of the execu-
               tive order is consistent with these 
               responsibilities nor am I convinced 
               that the executive order is lawful.



  




















      It's harder than they
      thought, to extinguish
      sanity in this country.
      Harder, still, to close
      its heart.
























Pete Marovich
  Sally Q. Yates
  Acting Attorney General
    of the United States
Getty Images©

Nicholas O'Donohue








We go home now viii






What we are confronted by, is new
only in technology, not technique.
I'm terribly sorry if antiquity e-
quips one to recall what propagan-
da has so long concealed, that the
President's political Party is not
only adept at intimidation and mis-
information. It feeds on them. So
now the President exploits an im-
plement for keeping his followers,
ignorant and aroused. This is only
faster than the trickling down of
editorials from The Wall Street
Journal, and the club car brood-
ing still in vogue. I refuse the
pretense that Republicans are not
thrilled to have a nitwit at their
disposal, once again. They deified
the first one, and exploited the
pants off the latest one. We may
be repulsed by the face they've
chosen, but you can do only so
much for Dorian Gray.







Scribes who instruct us now, to
be dazzled by the rapidity with
which the vortex extracts our pa-
tience, have been schooled to ex-
tend great patience to vapidity.
Yes, the incumbent is movingly in-
fantile; yes, his bawling resounds
with the speed of summer lightning;
but to forget the entitled Andover
cheerleader and the Hollywood po-
seur would still leave us with the
bare knuckled tyrant from Whittier,
the godfather of their Jim Crow
economy, long before globalism.

Shadows are fallin', and I've been
here all day .. There's not even
room enough, to be anywhere ..

If Republicanism always finds its
idiot, now it's overshot the mark.
They're out of protection to sell.
This creature's landfill is theirs.
His dust is theirs. His ashes, too. 



























Bob Dylan
Time out of mind
  Not dark yet
1997

ii  Laurent
     Market Street
       Pride March
     1990

















Sunday, January 29, 2017

And now for something completely fair


































Thomas Peter
Roger Federer
  in Melbourne
Reuters©






Horror's perfect circle









  We all know people
  who thought, 
  He could not mean it.

  We all know people
  who thought,
  A little discipline
  can't hurt.

  We all know people
  who thought.






    One can't believe
    the continent was
    placed here for a
    brokerage of fear.







              A youth in Jakarta, orphaned by
              a Taliban terrorist bomb stands
              at the shuttered doors of those
              same United Nations, whom Nikki
              Haley now promises to teach the
              manners of bending to our will.

              An ancient writ, habeas corpus,
              deliver the body, inconvenience
              as it is, jams a snarling snare
              prefigured in the flab a spoilt
              child wears to show as muscled,
              his coterie flaunts to signify,
              their social climb is achieved.

              They make this place an asylum,
              they will not share. Still, new
              blood is offered, to redeem the
              ports we close to keep us free.
              Such is the energy of the hour,
              that fear is rinsed with tears,
              and resolution gathers, bodily.

              At last the great monstrosities
              that devoted our people to ter-
              ror as a way to shield ourself,
              release their foulest pendulum,
              Dorian Gray once hid, for this.






           
    I think Brexit's going to be a 
    wonderful thing for your country. 
    I think when it irons out, you're 
    gonna have your own identity and 
    you're going to have the people 
              































iv  Kemal Jufri
       Sardar Hussain, Jakarta
    January 28, 2017
    The New York Times©

v   Second Amendment Survivors
     Sandy Hook Elementary School
     December, 2012
     Reuters©

President of the United States
Remarks to the Prime Minister
  of Great Britain
The White House
Washington, DC
January 27, 2017